Friday, September 27, 2013

Stoppard's End

Still living on Netflix time, Chez Buce
took in a screening the other night of the first two episodes of
Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End
as rendered by BBC.

No,
wait, that's not right: this is Tom Stoppard's
rendition, drawing on the novels by Ford Madox Ford. The
distinction is not just some Hollywood agent earning his percentage.
No: unlike so many film renditions of classic novels, the one thing
this is not is a mere visual accompaniment to a novel you've
probably been meaning to read since you left the English
Department—an accompaniment which, truth to tell, just won't be a
lot of fun if you never kept that promise. Stoppard's presentation
is in short, nothing if not free-standing.

But at
the same time it is not just a flight of fancy, highjacking the
author's name and fame for the purpose of better marketing (right—and
just how much marketing pull does Ford Madox Ford enjoy?--ed.). No,
Stoppard clearly draws on the novels: in many ways, he's quite
faithful. As a playwright he works hard to do justice to one of the
lonely monuments of 20th
Century fiction. And while you can perfectly well enjoy the video
without the novel, the two do make fruitful companions. It happens
that we—Mr. And Mrs. Buce--did do Parade's End—together,
as a readaloud-- and just a couple of years back so it is still
fairly fresh in our minds. And it's fun to watch Stoppard as he
draws it out and gives it his own spin. And in a lot of cases, I
think you'd agree that Stoppard actually improves the original by
putting an extra spin on something that Ford was too shy or reticent
to set out n its original form.